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Conversant in Arabic, English, Hebrew, and French, Ali Mohamed fancied himself a spy, and a spy was exactly what Zawahiri wanted, especially one who could infiltrate the American intelligence services. Zawahiri and other Egyptian radicals blamed the United States for supporting Egypt’s brutal dictatorship and sneered at what they perceived as America’s corrupt and decadent morality. The Egyptians were ahead of the curve, eyeing the United States as a potential enemy even as the CIA was helping arm the mujahideen in Afghanistan.28

Infiltrating the CIA was Mohamed’s first assignment from Zawahiri. Mohamed began by simply walking into the U.S. embassy in Cairo and asking to talk to the CIA case officer stationed there. Skeptical but eager for Arabic-speaking sources, the agency tried him out in Germany, assigning him to infiltrate a mosque whose head cleric was connected to Hezbollah. What the CIA didn’t tell him was that the agency had already infiltrated the mosque.

Mohamed’s first act as a CIA asset was to tell the target of the investigation that he was working for the CIA and had been ordered to spy on him. The agent already in place reported this back to the agency, and Mohamed’s CIA career came to an abrupt halt. The CIA issued a burn notice to U.S. and allied intelligence services that Mohamed was not to be trusted. He was not told why he was released.29

Mohamed spent the next several months working as a counterterrorism adviser for Egypt Air, where he gained valuable information about airline security that would come into play years later. The ultimate target remained the United States, however, and in 1986 Mohamed hopped on a plane for New York.

How he got his visa is a mystery—the burn notice added Mohamed’s name to a visa watch list. At the time, however, the United States was still trying to work out whether it could leverage Islamic extremists to fight communism more broadly than in Afghanistan, and Mohamed was not the only dangerous person to slip across the border. Whether by oversight or strategic miscalculation, the State Department let a walking time bomb enter the country.30

Wasting no time, Mohamed proposed to a woman he had met on the flight into New York, and they were married in Reno six weeks later. Now secure in his ability to stay in America for an extended period, he turned to his assignment. First, he set up a communications hub near his wife’s home in California. Joining him there was Khalid Abu El Dahab, an Islamic Jihad operative whom Mohamed had personally recruited. “Be patient,” Mohamed told his protégé. “There is a bigger plan.”31

Mohamed walked into an army recruiter’s office in Oakland, California, and enlisted.32 Still extremely fit at age thirty-two, he aced basic training and soon scored an assignment at Fort Bragg at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center, which trains elite Special Forces soldiers in conventional and unconventional warfare, including psychological operations.

Initially, Mohamed worked as a supply sergeant, but with his unique background and strong language skills, he was tapped to serve as assistant director of the Middle East Seminar for the Special Operations and International Studies Department in the school. Ayman Al Zawahiri’s trusted spy was now educating the U.S. Army about the Middle East.

Mohamed’s tenure at Fort Bragg was a comedy of errors. He seemed to relish the role of spy but somehow remained oblivious to the fact that spies are not meant to be seen. In his spare time, he rifled through any loose papers he could find on the base, taking copies of maps and army training manuals that might be useful to Zawahiri’s Islamic Jihad down to the local Kinko’s to make copies.

He also copied dozens of documents marked “top secret,” which must have delighted him. Many of these were actually simulated secret documents used in a training exercise, listing fictitious fleet positions and containing little intelligence of value.33 Other material was more sensitive. Eventually Mohamed